The Coming of Coffee’s Fourth Wave?

Finally, finally, it’s the first of July, and you know what that means: Stumptown Stubbies have arrived in New York. It is never fair when New York has to wait for something Portland got months ago, but it’s been particularly difficult being patient about the Stubbies. Stubbies are stub-necked little brown bottles that you think will contain Red Stripe beer but actually contain cold-brewed Stumptown coffee. Stumptown coffee, for those of you who don’t live within a fifteen-mile radius of a hipster hotspot (Brooklyn, Portland, Seattle), is a coffee company whose brews have been hailed as seductive and pure, sublime and crack-like. The company itself is sometimes praised for its retro-hip baristas (they wear caps and pinstriped vests and suspenders and they have many tattoos) and ethical-indie business practices; it is also often reviled for the attitude these things suggest. Also recently it’s been reviled for possibly dropping the indie part of its ethical-indie business practices (it took on a big new investor and will be expanding, though it remains controlled by its creator, Duane Sorenson). Todd Carmichael, a co-founder of the anti-hipster coffee roasters La Colombe, blogged that Sorenson had “sold his soul to the highest bidder.” Though in the past Carmichael has lamented that hipster-coffee culture, of which Stumptown is king, was unbearable “for men with normal estrogen levels,” he now feels nostalgic for the good old old days, when he and Sorenson would enjoy some playful riffing: “I miss the late-night texting battles over coffee philosophy and the playful rants about baristas. In a way, Duane was the yin to my yang, the duck to my jab.”

Is this just sour beans, or does Carmichael have a point? It all comes down to those late-night philosophy texts. Stumptown, as part of coffee’s “third wave,” has always had philosophy to spare; spreading that philosophy is an enormous part of the company’s ethos, and if they stop philosophizing, they’ll stop being Stumptown. In a recent book called “Coffee Philosophy for Everyone: Grounds for Debate,” a collection of essays by academics and foodies, there is an interview with Matt Lounsbury, Stumptown’s director of operations. Lounsbury talks about the coffee waves—the first was when espresso arrived on our shores; the second was when Starbucks brought us expensive specialty coffee; and the third is now, when coffee has gotten really expensive and is treated less like a commodity and more like wine, something for connoisseurs to palate and philosophers to mull.

One “idea” of the third wave is, Lounsbury says, “similar to terroir with wine… A coffee can be an individual expression of a place.” And like wine, there’s a whole world built around it. Stumptown has “someone whose job it is to taste coffee all day long.” They have “five people at Stumptown who do espresso and coffee education full time.” They turn down “nine out of ten wholesale customers,” and those they accept must undergo a full day of training at the roastery. They are community-builders, first and foremost, installing washing-stations in Rwanda so the beans harvested there won’t “go to crap.” In America, they go into “really crappy neighborhoods and now there are theatres and local restaurants and new retail businesses”; and they make love-connections: “I can’t tell you the number of people who have met in line in our coffee shops and gotten married.” Coffee producers from impoverished countries “tear up” when they visit a store and see their coffee’s name on a chalkboard “and it’s the first time they’ve ever seen their names in writing.” But all this, Lounsbury says, “is not idealism. We’re running a business. We sell coffee.”

I think it’s more like a business-idealism muddle, and thus a bit of a philosophical muddle (Lounsbury’s interviewer at one point complains, “When I ask you about aesthetics, you slip into ethics, and when I ask you about ethics you slip into aesthetics”). The question now becomes whether one can become a bigger business and still retain an ethical-indie ’tude. Sorenson is trying, writing on the company’s Web site that “Stumptown will continue to be about the coffee and the relationships we have—with our employees, our farmers, our customers and all the folks looking for the finest coffees available.” But many think this could mark the end of the high-philosophy coffee third wave: “In an era when ‘selling out’ is widely seen as shrewdly ‘buying in,’ it’s only a matter of time before some multinational conglomerate snatches up every last ‘locally-sourced’ hipster sacred cow!,” Gothamist worries (ironically). If this happens, will it mean that we’ll be in coffee’s fourth wave? And if so, will we get to leave the philosophy behind? I hope so (I can do without the suspenders), yet I fear it will spell the end of super-high quality control at Stumptown. I guess I’d better start stockpiling Stubbies now.